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iZotope: Merging Maths With Music

27 Jul 2017

We all aspire to be the next Sir. George Martin, Rick Rubin or Suzanne Ciani in the studio, but the reality is that very few of us will be able to master the balance of musical creativity and technical proficiency that those superstars achieved. Thankfully, we can rely on modern tools to help make up for some of our deficiencies. In the hardware realm, Focusrite strive to ‘make music easy to make’, by removing some of the technical hurdles that stand between a great song and a great record. On the software side, there are hundreds of companies, literally, making everything from vintage-gear-modelling plugins to entire band-in-a-box style software instruments. Others are more innovative, and provide tools that can take your musical creations in new directions. iZotope are probably best known for this.

Hailing from the Boston — with close ties to MIT, Berklee College Of Music and other great American educational institutions — iZotope have taken advantage of some of the best brains in the north-east USA. Their plugins are a true cross section of music and math: clever, innovative and powerful, yet creative and intuitive. Here are a few reasons why we’re big fans:

1. They make inspirational tools
Writer’s block? Don’t worry, we’ve all had it. Thankfully, iZotope’s tools can lend a helping hand here, especially if you want to expand your rhythmic creativity. If you’re struggling for ideas, Stutter Edit and Break Tweaker — both designed by electronic musician BT and developed by iZotope — help you get innovative results like never before, with very intuitive user interfaces.

2. They help out with the technicals
Some music makers are blessed with an endless supply of musical ideas, but lack the skills to polish their creations. For those inexperienced in mixing, the ‘Track Assistant’ tool in Neutron — iZotope’s mixing and post-production tool — will analyse the frequency and dynamic content of your tracks, and create custom presets. From this optimal starting point, you can finesse your mix with ease and concentrate on other areas of the production.

3. They can fix your audio when it’s broken
About 10 years ago, iZotope began to changed the world of audio restoration — literally. In the early days of digital audio, restoration processors were phenomenally expensive and normally only accessible to police forensic teams and well-heeled post-production houses. But as home and laptop computing technology improved, iZotope began to develop the RX suite of tools to help the average user take care of pops, clicks and other noise in their audio — without breaking the bank.

Today, RX 6 is described as “like Photoshop, but for sound” by iZotope CEO Mark Ethier. And it’s a worthy comparison. RX’s spectrograph allows you to ‘see’ the imperfections in your audio, so that you can highlight and delete them, just as you would a blemish in a digital image. Very clever.

As you can see, iZotope can be your friend in the studio. Check out the latest from the company here: www.izotope.com